In 1894 France, Madeleine Karno hopes to
follow in her father’s footsteps as a pathologist. She is passionate about
medicine and especially about science and how it can help the dead 'speak.' When
a young girl is found lifeless outside her own home, the autopsy can find no
evidence of murder; however, the discovery of tiny mites in her nostrils leads
Madeleine and her father on a lengthy investigation involving the girl’s family,
a priest, abused children, and a convent school that has a three-hundred year
tradition of keeping wolves.

By the end, the story is littered with
corpses, each needing careful pathological inspection. Madeleine is chillingly threatened, but she lives and justice
prevails.

Minna Bernays is the younger sister
of Martha, Sigmund Freud's wife. Her own fiancé has died and by 1895,
she is reduced to joining her sister’s family in Vienna because she has abandoned
her position as a companion to a demanding, prejudiced aristocrat. The six Freud
children love her, but she finds them exhausting and undisciplined. Obsessed
with order, housework, and social standing, and possibly suffering from psychosomatic ailments, Martha is happy to leave the care
of the children to Minna. She disapproves of her husband’s theories about
sexual frustration as a cause of mental distress and refuses to discuss his
ideas. Nevertheless, Martha is well aware that growing anti-semitism hampers
her husband’s career, and she is eager for him to succeed: he could consider a
conversion of convenience, like the composer Gustav Mahler.

Minna finds herself drawn to Sigmund for
his intellect and his novel ideas. She is also attracted to him physically, and
he to her. She resists the temptation, but he does not and actively pursues
her, inducing her to try cocaine too. He justifies it - the sex and the drugs - as
necessities for mental and physical well-being and he rejects the guilt that, he
claims, so-called civilization would impose.

She tries to leave by finding another job
as a ladies’ companion in Frankfurt, but he follows her there. They escape for an
idyllic holiday to a hotel in Switzerland, then he brings her back to the family
home. But his ardor cools and she is wounded, displaced by his enthusiasm for Wilhelm Fliess and Lou Andreas-Salomé.

Soon she discovers that she is pregnant,
and Freud sends her away to a “spa” for an abortion, but at the last moment,
she decides to keep her baby. Sadly she miscarries and returns to the Freud
family with whom she remains for more than four decades until her death in
1941.

On the Move: A Life describes the extraordinary life of
Oliver Sacks from his childhood during World War II to shortly before its 2015
publication. Using his journals (“nearly a thousand,” he writes),
correspondence, and memories—as well as his 14 or so books—Sacks has given
himself free rein to describe and analyze his long, productive, and unusual
life.

A dozen chapter headings nominally corral his wide
variety of interests, adventures, and travels, including his medical career,
his homosexuality, and diverse writing projects.

Sacks came from an English medical family, including some observant Jews, but
not him. As a youth he loved (prophetically) writing and chemistry. He rode
motorcycles then and for many years to come. He did poorly on his Oxford
practical anatomy exam but immediately (and drunk on hard cider) sat for a
competitive essay on anatomy and won a large prize. Later, he was warned
away from bench science and focused successfully on patient care, patient
narratives, and personal essays of many sorts, including A Leg To Stand
On, the account of his injured leg and recovery.

Sacks left England for Canada, then the
US. He quotes from some of the journals about his travels. In LA, he
worked out at Muscle Beach (setting a California squat record) and did drugs,
including amphetamines. A shy man, he thought of himself as Doppelganger: Dr.
Sacks by day, a black-garbed biker by night.

Fascinated by vision and photography, Sacks
includes 58 photos from the ’50s to 2006; some black and white, some in
color. These are printed together on slick paper and well illustrate his
text.

Neurology training concluded, Sacks served various
institutions in New York but read widely, ever eager to find theories of brain
chemistry, anatomy, perception, behavior, and more. As readers of his books
know, he enjoyed using his own interests in drugs, music, and travel, as well
as personal medical experiences such as his injured leg and his lack of facial
recognition. He describes his meetings with patients with unusual dilemmas: the
postencephalics of Awakenings, as well as people with Tourette’s
syndrome, deafness, colorblindness, autism, or migraines. He became
fascinated—obsessed, one might say—with these and wrote so voluminously that
cuts had to be made from his huge manuscripts to yield books.

Sacks describes interaction with editors, film crews, playwrights and others
wishing to collaborate. His audiences grew as he became an intermediary to the
non-medical public. We read about Peter Brook, W. H. Auden, Jonathan Miller,
Bob Silvers (New York Review of Books), the cartoonist Al Capp (a
cousin), Abba Eban (another cousin), Stephen Jay Gould, Temple Grandin, Francis
Crick, and others. One striking passage describes taking Robert DeNiro and
Robin Williams to see locked-in patients in preparation for the film version
of Awakenings.

In his 70s, his robust health faded. He had a
melanoma in his right eye, with more than three years of treatment before it
became blind. Being Sacks, he observed interesting phenomena as his vision
changed, “a fertile ground of enquiry” (p. 376). His left knee was replaced. He
had sciatica.

He fell in love again after 35 years of celibacy; he dedicates his book to his
partner Billy Hayes.

In 1847, one of every six women whose babies were delivered by the medical students and supervising doctors at Allgemeine Krankenhaus (General Hospital) in Vienna died of puerperal fever (also known as childbed fever). In contrast, the incidence of this disease in women delivered by hospital midwives was dramatically lower and puerperal fever was quite rare when mothers had their babies born at home.While a few physicians (most notably Alexander Gordon and Oliver Wendell Holmes) realized that childbed fever was a contagious process, it was Semmelweis who identified the nature of the problem as stemming from the failure of obstetricians and medical students to wash their hands and change their clothing, especially after performing autopsies or doing surgery. He mandated that doctors and students wash with a disinfectant (chloride of lime) before examining any woman in labor.Despite the dramatic reduction of maternal mortality on his obstetrical unit, his ideas and methods were not well received. Semmelweis was reluctant to conduct experiments on animals to prove his theory and resisted publishing his findings in any medical journal. When he finally did write a book, The Etiology, the Concept, and the Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, it was difficult to read and failed to impress many obstetrical experts.With his health failing and his behavior increasingly erratic and inappropriate, Semmelweis was committed to a state-run mental hospital. He died two weeks later. The official cause of death was sepsis secondary to an infection of his finger. The author is convinced, however, based on the autopsy report and findings upon exhumation of the body in 1963, that Semmelweis was beaten to death by the staff at the asylum. He may well have been suffering from Alzheimer's presenile dementia at the time.

Linden, a professor of neuroscience, has written a book for a general audience on the subject of touch. A synthetic thinker, he combines insights from science, anatomy, neurophysiology, psychology, and social behavior. He argues that touch pervades much of human experience: “From consumer choice to sexual intercourse, from tool use to chronic pain to the process of healing, the genes, cells, and neural circuits involved in the sense of touch have been crucial to creating our unique human experience” (p. 5). Case studies of medical oddities enliven his account.

Chapter One, “The Skin is a Social Organ,” draws on a wide range of examples, from NBA players to vampire bats. Touch is especially important to the development of human newborns. Lab experiments have shown that the attitude of the toucher can influence the experience of the touched. English and American cultures are touch aversive.

Chapter Two discusses the neurophysiology of touch, the sensory nerves and the neurons that link to the spinal cord or to the brain. Lively examples include string players, 1900-era women with “underwear-shaped numbness,” and the Braille writing system for the blind.

In Chapter Three, “The Anatomy of a Caress,” Linden explores further the tactile fibers that relay touch. “A caress communicates that you are safe,” he writes, and the C-tactile system is the main route from skin to the brain.

Chapter Four, “Sexual Touch,” moves beyond caress all the way to orgasm, detailing the roles of touch receptors and brain activity as well as the wide variety of personal and social contexts.

Chapter Five looks at nerve endings of human skin that detect chili peppers as hot and mint as cool. Vampire bats have another version that detect heat, useful for locating blood vessels on “donors.”

Chapter Six, “Pain and Emotion,” opens with Pakistani children who do not feel pain; they have a genetic mutation that influences a sodium channel in neurons. Pain itself varies with people’s emotions, experience, and expectations. Some mindfulness practices (yoga, Tai Chi, meditation) can lessen chronic pain.

Chapter Seven, “The Itchy and Scratchy Show,” discusses river blindness and shingles, among other topics.

Chapter Eight, “Illusion and Transcendence,” provides a helpful overview of sensory nerves and their connection to various parts of the brain. Some stimuli activate the “emotional-affective-cognitive portions,” while others activate “sensory-discriminative centers.” Touch, in general, often has strong social meanings but does not, for Linden, imply any supernatural dimensions.

Although Dr. Helman’s untimely death did not permit a final editing by this prodigious writer, the published edition is not a book-in-progress. An Amazing Murmur of the Heart: Feeling the Patient’s Beat represents a powerful and persistent continuation of observations and themes that grew out of medical education, close observations of physicians and patients, and his studies in anthropology. All of these forge an approach to patient care that is out of the ordinary.

As his previous writings suggest, Helman is passionate about medicine but concerned, equally about the emergence of those who fail to listen and to those who might be called techno-doctors. While professing his appreciation of and attraction to the magic machine or computer, he is mindful of its absence of emotion and ambiguity. “For this post-human body is one that exists mainly in abstract, immaterial form. It is a body that has become pure information.” (p. 11)

Chapters are comprised of stories about patients and their care providers, each representing complex facets that defy precise measurement, answers and conclusions. As Helman steadily notes, the physician must be an archeologist:

Most patients present their doctors with only the broken shards of human life—the one labeled infection, disease, suffering and pain each of these shards is only a small part of a much larger picture….the doctor will have to try and reconstruct the rest. (p.66)

In general, the chapters illustrate first an initial review of medical history, and then specific patient stories. Of the two, the story is most important. “Mask of Skin,” for example, begins with an overview of skin from Vesalius to the present: largest organ, stripped bare by anatomists, penetrated by disease, later scanned and X-Rayed, tattooed, re-fitted by surgeons, etc. That said, Helman the physician-anthropologist, moves from science to specific stories about patients whose skin may cover profound experiences, psychic and otherwise, that might be overlooked by a dermatologist. Although skin is involved in each of that chapter’s stories, the willing physician must dig deeper in his observations and caring manner to make more profound discoveries.

In a chapter entitle “Healing and Curing” the author describes an old friend, a practitioner who provides advice about patient care that ”was not included in his medical texts”. Patients are more than a diagnosis dressed in clothes. Doctors must make patients “feel seen, listened to, alive”. Always patients should be regarded as people who happen to be sick. From his admired colleague Helman learned to be an attentive listener to the "tiny, trivial, almost invisible things" in patient encounters and stories. To truly heal as well as cure requires the doctor to empathise with what the patient is feeling thereby requiring both an act of imagination and of the heart. The chapter, of course, continues with with stories that illustrate the points enunciated by his colleague and accepted by his disciple.

This book combines social history with personal memoir. It serves as a reflection on how the various challenges of living with chronic illness have shifted over time, and how they are still real and present for the increasing portion of the population who suffer from ills invisible to others and often hard to account for. The book's brief treatments of cultural and medical approaches to chronic illness, from ancient practices to "patients in the digital age," provide a broad perspective against which to consider current legislative, political, medical, and personal concerns for those coping with chronic illness or disability.

The author is a practicing neurosurgeon, one of only two hundred or so women in this specialty which numbers about 4,500. She was the first woman to be admitted to her neurosurgery residency program. Her father was a surgeon and she was definitely influenced by him and says that, as the oldest of four children, it was always expected that she would become a doctor; but she didn't decide for sure until partway through her second year of college.

Once in medical school her decision for neurosurgery as her specialty came very easily. Oliver Sacks's writing had a significant influence on her decision. She was also influenced by her college sweetheart who became her husband and who also chose to train as a neurosurgeon. He is not practicing now and they do not have children.

Her description of her long years of training are interestingly related with many individual patient stories and also many descriptions of her teachers and peers. She takes time to describe how she views the specialty itself and its power structure and all that entails. Among the interesting chapters are two about her research years, one at the center for cognitive brain imaging at Carnegie-Mellon and one as a fellow in Epilepsy Surgery. The author was fascinated with the complexity of brain function and its relation to anatomical structure with which she was much more familiar.

Firlik found that she loved "life on the learning curve" and that her curiosity was broad. About her last year as Chief Resident she said "I have had my hand in saving lives and I have had my hand in helping to end them: I'm not talking about murder, of course. I am talking about helping people die" (227). She was able to write this book because she kept a journal during her training.

In a dramatic monologue, Joanne traces the devastation of a familial proclivity to breast cancer through four generations of women: her grandmother Sarah; her mother; Joanne herself and her two daughters, one of whom is also Sarah.

Joanne’s mother and grandmother both died very young of breast cancer; however, many other family members vanished in the Holocaust and the number of familial cancer deaths is insufficient for her to qualify for genetic testing. Her friend Linda, also a mother of two daughters, learns too late that she carries the BRCA gene; she urges Joanne to be tested.

Tormented by not knowing and equally tormented by what should be done if the test is positive—both for herself and her daughters, she convinces a doctor to lie so that the test can be performed. It is positive; Joanne opts for bilateral preventative mastectomies. During a visit to the gravesite of her mother and grandmother, she begins to explain the genetic risk to her daughters.

Twelve-year old Philip is admitted to the hospital for a month of nightly infusions of amphotericin, a drug used to treat severe fungal infections. Wise beyond his years, he’s been in the hospital before and is only too familiar with its routines: the "vampires" who take blood; the candy-stripers who volunteer cheerfulness.

Four nurses welcome Philip back, teasing him about his annoying but intelligent insights and promising excellent outcomes this time. The doctors are testing a wonderful new drug that should eliminate all the horrible side effects that he had experienced in the past. But the new drug does not work, and Philip passes a miserable night.

He feels sorry for his parents who are eager for him to receive the best of care; he puts on a smile for them and notices them putting on smiles for him. He tries to be brave for the doctor too, but surprises himself by voicing his opinion, finally making his physician understand that the new anti-side-effect drug does not work.

In the midst of yet another difficult night, Philip decides that he will refuse all future infusions. And he begins to feel well. We do not know what will happen in the morning, but one has the hopeful impression that Phillip will have his own way.